Saturday, 25 February 2012

Is this war not going so well?

There have been sharp squeals about President Obama’s war on religion via the dissemination of birth control, and now the Rick Santorum Brigades in Afghanistan have come to the same conclusion. Incredibly, assassins struck inside the Afghan Interior Ministry yesterday and killed two American army officers. Kabul and other cities appear to be on the verge of even further meltdown, hard as that may be to imagine, over the accidental burning of Korans by goofballs in the U.S. military who still haven’t quite realized what country they’re trying to conquer.

Of course, it’s also possible that the ‘mistake’ was nothing of the sort. We’ve heard plenty of stories about deliberate sacrilege against Islamic symbols as a form of psychological torture in both the Bagram and Guantánamo dungeons, so another incident of desecration of Muslim holy books should come as no surprise. This time, however, the surprise falls to the the occupation forces dealing with the virulent reaction by pious, Santorumite Afghans. The NY Times quotes one official as saying that no was ‘panicking’, which should be interpreted to mean that everyone is.

‘We’re in a weaker position than we were maybe two or three or four weeks ago’, said this unnamed official who then proceeded to explain that neither he nor anyone else in charge has a plan: ‘I’m not sure anyone knows the clear way forward. It’s gotten more and more complicated. It’s fraught’.

Yeah, fraught, that’s the word I would use. When your supposed allies can’t stop a soldier from whacking your officers in the Interior Ministry—and get away with it!—you’ve definitely got a problem on your hands.

So after a decade of conquest and occupation, constant drone attacks that blow up wedding parties and kids herding sheep, the Obama ‘surge’ of extra troops that was supposed to fix things, Karzai’s stolen election that the NATO allies promptly endorsed since they needed him to win, drug trafficking by the president’s brother, and steady gains by the Taliban and other warlords, our hardware-happy military chiefs don’t know what the fuck to do next. Not even the wizard Petraeus.

In response to the killings, all NATO and U.S. military advisers were withdrawn from Afghan ministries, leaving one to question what exactly is the state of ongoing coordination between the occupiers and the purported government of the country they are occupying.

Obama tried to apologize for the Koran-burning but was promptly undercut by Newt Gingrich who said the Afghanis could piss off up a rope and take their Korans with them. In some parallel universe, Obama or a surrogate would accuse Gingrich of endangering American troops with his remarks and get him to shut up. But the Democratic establishment prefers to continue as leatherman bottoms.

The slow-motion debacle in Afghanistan is but one of the many reasons people should not be celebrating the electoral successes of any of the current crop of Republican nutcases under the misguided notion that this helps humanistic causes by showing how extreme they are. There is plenty of volatility in our biped world, and the re-election chances of Commander Obama are ‘fraught’ with many obstacles. One of these circus clowns could end up as president, and that would not be a laughing matter.